Portable wireless communication and information devices are proliferating rapidly among business and personal users. At the same time, an ever increasing amount and variety of information is becoming available over communications networks such as the Internet, particularly through the Internet's HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) component, also referred to as the Worldwide Web, or simply the Web. Information on the Web has been encoded primarily in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document formatting language, permitting users accessing the information to select highlighted hyperlinks embedded in documents leading to other, related documents. HTML affords users a measure of interactivity with content stored on and accessible through the Web.
The nature of content on the Web has more recently evolved to include more interactivity in the form of what is referred to as dynamic content. Dynamic content takes several forms on the Web, including the use of Dynamic HTML, HTML 4.0, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, VBScript, and XML. The most prevalent, and most widely supported, form of integrated dynamic content is the use interactive scripts, programmed in the JavaScript scripting language, embedded into HTML web pages. JavaScript, as well as the other forms of interactivity mentioned above, allows a web page to be designed such that its content presentation, and the actual content itself, varies depending on the actions taken by the user accessing the content.
However, most wireless devices, such as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), do not contain the processing power or the necessary complex software to read, interpret and execute the dynamic content contained in many interactive web pages today. The limitations of wireless devices thus limit the experience for the users of such devices attempting to access and utilize content available on the web.
Wireless information gateways have been implemented to act as proxies between wireless devices and the World Wide Web. A typical wireless information gateway fetches web pages from a web site using HTTP and then sends such pages to wireless devices using wireless protocols, including the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP). Wireless devices are generally limited in computing power and display capabilities when compared to other devices used for accessing information on the Worldwide Web. Thus, the wireless devices do not directly handle most web pages encoded in HTML. Instead, the wireless devices must rely on wireless information gateways to perform a translation function that converts HTML web pages to pages encoded in a simplified markup language, such as Wireless Markup Language (WML). The major functions of a wireless information gateway are two-fold: 1) terminate wireless transport protocols while acting as a proxy to fetch web information for wireless devices, and 2) translate web content into simplified formats suitable for display by wireless devices.
Since existing wireless information gateways can only perform static page translations, wireless devices do not now have access to web sites that include dynamic web content.
A need exists to provide a means for delivering dynamic and interactive content to the more limited wireless devices now accessing information on the Internet.